Continuing with episode 2. Last time I read up to the end of chapter 10, the second night after the Watanagashi festival. I'm posting this small update after reading the start of chapter 11, since for the first time I feel like I have enough information to actually put together a partially coherent theory.
Chapter 11 – the third day after the Watanagashi
The confused dog sounds like someone who isn't evil but may be hurting someone on purpose, because they incorrectly think that person is evil or dangerous. But for whatever reason, they're not a cat. Are the cats villagers? Children? Girls? We already seem to have labelled Mion, Shion and most likely Keiichi as cats. Rika herself can't be the dog because if she were the dog wouldn't be confused. Who's left? Satoko? Surely Satoko either knows everything Rika does or is close enough to her that she'd have been able to intervene. An adult? Ooishi definitely has the capacity to be nosey, to misunderstand things and to hurt people. The mayor? We know so little about him, but maybe Shion confided something in him and he misunderstood it and overreacted, and thus could be the confused dog?
As Rena explains that Rika and Satoko couldn't have left on their bikes to play, I cannot help but notice the way we got an example of how kids' bikes can easily be transported in an estate car like the police had brought.
Why does Rena's speculation of Satoko calling a house to see if Rika is there asleep sound so familiar? Did we hear something similar already?
You know far more than Rena does, do you Keiichi?
Keiichi explicitly says that he had zero sense that anyone was watching him. Things are definitely different this time. Whatever happened to him in Onikakushi is either not happening at all or is happening to someone else this time in Watanagashi.
Keiichi is wondering why he and Shion haven't been targeted and is coming up blank. One possible reason is that Shion is the culprit. A separate possible reason is that whoever is responsible is doing what Shion described, picking off all the people close to you in order to punish you. If Shion is the culprit, who is she trying to punish? It doesn't seem like she has great motivation for punishing Keiichi in particular, nor does he seem like the closest person to anyone to save for last. For example, if she was trying to punish Mion and working her way through the people close to her, then Rena probably seems the closest. Although if Mion had a crush on Keiichi then he could be a powerful tool for sticking the knife in. We also just don't have a whole lot of well fleshed out characters left to be culrpits at this point...
I'll tell you next time.
Keiichi nooooo you can't say something like that to Rena!
Rena was entirely confident Keiichi wasn't the culprit. Is she just very trusting or does she somehow already know everything Keiichi knows?
Is there any possibility that Takano's corpse was misidentified? It seems real suspicious that she was burned so badly. She was identified by dental records, but there are still ways around that: replace the records by breaking into the dentist or by having a collaborator. Or the person we knew as Takano was never the real Takano, while the real Takano was the one who died.
How can the Three Families attend the meeting... Rika is the only Furude left? This would mean she was in attendance, no?
Comedy of errors... was the mayor's secretive hospital trip leading others to be more suspicious of him? People would have wanted to get in touch before the meeting to find out and even influence his stance. If he could not be found perhaps they would think he was having an audience with their enemies.
Keiichi getting suspicious of Shion's story, finally.
Keiichi tells Ooishi there was nothing inside the storehouse. Is that the point? Was there supposed to be something inside that wasn't obvious to them but that was revealed to the others by the fact of their intrusion?
Shion disappeared the next day?! When did she last talk to Keiichi? It was at earliest the evening of that day, right? Keiichi must have talked to her after she vanished.
Sooo... was Keiichi talking to Mion, or to a Shion who had already gone into hiding? Shion doesn't really have the same voice as Mion, do we have any reason to believe they are particularly good at imitating each other over the phone? But they speak in a very different tone of voice, maybe they sound very similar when they are doing it on purpose.
Or the wilder alternative, Shion did away with Mion and "disappeared" by becoming Mion. We have barely gotten to see Mion, she has been exhausted every time, and she had that weird outburst about Satoko when only Keiichi was around. This would mean that it was Shion in the Sonozaki residence stopping people from talking to Oryou. Maybe this isn't so wild a theory. Shion has better motivations to be pretending Oryou is alive when she was the one to kill her.
Rika would have trusted Mion to borrow soy sauce from her. And obviously nobody would suspect Mion or search her house.
Mind you, one thing I can't explain is why Rika was so confident she could sort things out. It sounds like she must have had a different theory of what was going on. Mind you, we know she must have been at the meeting. So she would have known that everybody knew about the four people sneaking into the storehouse. Maybe it genuinely wasn't a big deal, until Shion started killing people?
Is my Shion theory correct? I feel like Battler with the dramatic music playing, confident against the golden witch, about to be absolutely shredded by red truths.